Email: Keep it brief and images to a minimum

Email remains a core communication channel for marketers but in order to make it through increasingly busy inboxes those messages need to be kept short and sweet, according to a new survey from HubSpot and Litmus.

In their "Science of Email 2014" report, HubSpot and Litmus compared 1,000 email users' preferences with how they actually interacted with email.

Findings reveal various discrepancies such as users reporting a preference for image-based email while click-through rates were seen to drop the more images an email contained.

According to the report the findings reveal the difficulties surrounding a reliance on 'self-reported' data such as surveys.

"When taking surveys, users often answer in ways that reflect either what they think the data collector wants to hear or in ways that reflect what they want to think about themselves," states the report. "An email with mostly images sounds more interesting than an email with mostly text when spoken about in hypothetical terms, but the reality of them is somewhat different."

Another key finding of the report relates to the length of both the subject line and email body. As might be expected, getting to the point quickly is crucial to attract and maintain engagement and drive higher response rates. The inclusion in the subject line of certain words such as "download", "free" or "tomorrow" were also found to increase click-through.

Earlier this year, Econsultancy released their Email Marketing Industry Census 2014. It found that, in terms of ROI, email was ranked by 68% of companies as the channel that outperformed all others with 22% ranking it 'excellent' and 46% ranking it 'good'. Online display advertising came bottom of the pile with just 5% ranking it 'excellent' and 28% 'good'.